Reconciliation and Founding Wounds

W hen I wrote " Reconciliation: Building a Bridge from Complicity to Coherence in the Rhetoric of Race Relations, " I hoped it would help spark a conversation about reconciliation among rhetoricians, so I was very gratified when it appeared as a forum piece in this journal. The gratification multiplied with the publication of responses from three eminent scholars of the rhetoric of race relations and reconciliation. I consider the affirmations and critiques offered by Kirt H. Wilson, Erik Doxtader, and Mark Lawrence McPhail essential complements and clarifications to my initial sketching of the rhetorical nature and value of reconciliation. My response to them is twofold. On a theoretical level, I suggest how the approach I proposed and the perspectives my respondents presented complement one another within reconciliation as a coherent tragicomic praxis; I also respond to specific critiques of the perspective I offered and further flesh out that perspective. Parallel to this theoretical response, I consider several proposed and actual examples of racial reconciliation's practice, including Roy L. Brooks's Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for Black Reparations. I conclude by considering reconciliation's hope in the United States.

Reconciliation has been on the political agenda in Australia since the early 1990s and is now planted firmly in the public conscience. Australia celebrates reconciliation every year; political leaders talk often about reconciliation; schools teach reconciliation. Yet, if you take as performance indicators the gap in life expectancy, or the increasingly disproportionate numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in prison, one has to question whether Australia is walking further away from the work that is needed to heal and achieve true reconciliation. In this paper we will draw on our experiences of working within church and education contexts and critically engage with the challenges and limitations of reconciliation as we have encountered them. We suggest that it is necessary to talk about reconciliation in terms of a human rights agenda and make explicit the connections between reconciliation and policy and practices. As Lowitja O’Donoghue has said, “we must accept the truth of our history – it is the truth that will set us free”. But how do we dare to speak the truth when the dominant political discourse focuses on the perceived success of reconciliation?

2011

The Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence

Indigenous scholars and others have characterized Canadian discourses of reconciliation as supporting a top-down, government-defined and controlled agenda, which is at best ineffective and misleading and at worst fraudulent and recolonizing. Some have argued that reconciliation should only occur after the Indian Act has been abolished, reparations made, land and resources returned, and a political and economic nation-to-nation relationship restored. The author agrees that it is essential to look critically at state and nationalistic discourses of reconciliation and that neither the federal government, the churches, nor non-Indigenous peoples generally can or should control the agenda. However, while reconciliation is not a sufficient condition for decolonization in Canada, Indigenous resurgence on its own will not achieve full decolonization either. If the psychic structures of colonialism persist, various forms of neocolonialism will be prevalent even after a nominal “nation-to-nat...

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2017

The political ideal of reconciliation has gained increased prominence in recent decades, in part due to political experiments such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and other formal or informal truth or reconciliation processes. Here, I argue that there is a fundamental mendacity to reconciliation, given stubborn asymmetries of social power and disrespect. Reconciliation as an ideal carries an impetus towards resolution that covers over the necessary role that conflict plays in political struggles—including the role that conflict plays within struggles for reconciliation. Nevertheless, despite the mendacity of reconciliation, its meaning still holds political value. Reconciliation implies an orientation towards social repair, which even the strongest critics of reconciliation cannot bring themselves to reject. Some lies are worse than others, and some lies might be noble or necessary. Reconciliation is the latter—a fiction that is less pernicious than its absence. In this light, the task is to locate means of political reconciliation that do not obscure the conflicts and asymmetries of social life but enable social actors to face up to these conflicts and to discover novel ways to repair the damage that they can do.

2015

There is value in beginning with a thin conception of reconciliation. Otherwise our understanding of it in political terms is clouded because we will be prone to quickly literalize a metaphor. Our usual context for understanding reconciliation is interpersonal. We imagine a moment of harmony between friends, family members, or co-workers that is disrupted by some injury or misunderstanding that wounds. Reconciliation is then both a process and an outcome where that disruption is overcome, where the wound is acknowledged, and harmony, while not as innocent as before, is restored. That understanding, in a process Kenneth Burke described in the Rhetoric of Religion, is carried into other realms: into the realm of political and social institutions, but also and more fundamentally into the immaterial realm of the theological. Reconciliation is understood as not only between humans, but between body and soul, or between men and women and their god. From there, the meaning of reconciliatio...

Dutch Reformed Theological Journal = Nederduitse Gereformeerde Teologiese Tydskrif, 2010

The article is an analysis of the philosophical meaning and political prospects of the idea of reconciliation between all South Africans. The author is sceptical about this prospect. While he regards reconciliation as an admirable theological doctrine, he doubts whether it is easily translatable into socio-political practice in South Africa. The settlement reached in the aftermath of apartheid is not primarily to be explicated in terms of a model of reconciliation where people forgive and learn to like one another, but rather in terms of the Hobbesian model of a "war of all against all", redeemed by the restoration of basic values. The author analyses a variety of conceptions of reconciliation that were developed in the aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process. In South Africa, the emphasis should be on the "concilium" aspect of reconciliation, i.e. the (re-) constitution of an assembly for social, political and economic deliberation. A general commitment of all South Africans to the values embedded in the South African constitution holds far more promise for a peaceful future than and narrow emphasis on the idea of reconciliation. Let me state up front that I shall make a few remarks about the notion of reconciliation as a social and political, and not a theological, ideal, as is particularly pertinent in the context of recent South African history. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of the late 1990's was instrumental in launching the term to a position of remarkable prominence in the political discourse of this country. Although the high fever about reconciliation that accompanied the proceedings and report of the TRC has somewhat abated over the past few years, the term continues to crop up expectedly and unexpectedly in the ongoing discourse about South Africa's recovery from apartheid. I see today's event as an indication that it has not lost its prominence. At the same time I must, at the outset, apologize for the fact that I am not enthusiastic or starry-eyed about the idea that reconciliation ought to be out most prominent social and political ideal. I am particularly sceptical when the discourse about reconciliation is couched in a romanticist language that seemingly envisages a day when everybody will, again, like everybody else. If that is what is hoped for, no single society on earth is reconciled or, for that matter, has ever been. I therefore intend to be provocative and controversial, not merely for the sake of mischief, but rather for the sake of stimulating debate and the exchange of opposing, yet constructive ideas. Too many starry eyes about reconciliation are, in my opinion, the result of the non-applicability to hard politics of the kind of discourse, which is relied upon by many reconciliation fundi's. There is too much of a tendency to understand reconciliation with reference to the theological context that is often widely presupposed by well-meaning Christians who engage in this debate. The theological understanding of reconciliation draws heavily on St. Paul's argument, in 2 Cor. 5, that God has, in Christ, reconciled the world with Himself, and that that provides the basis for the ministry of inter-personal reconciliation that is bestowed on all believers. The reconciliation with God is essentially the fruit of the atonement of sin through Christ; hence the ministry of reconciliation is basically aimed at the absolution of inter-personal guilt.

수사학, 2009

Reconciliation apologies such as Representative Tony Hall's proposed congressional apology for slavery and his own apology at a reconciliation conference in Benin, West Africa raise questions about the means and standards by which representative apologies for historic group offenses may prove satisfactory. This essay explores such questions in light of John Hatch's theory of reconciliation and an analysis of Hall's apology in the context of the Benin conference. In conversation with the work of Erik Doxtader, Mark McPhail, Aaron Gresson, and Nicholas Tavuchis, the essay clarifies ways in which a public reconciliation apology differs from traditional apologia and the unique challenges confronting public discourse for racial reconciliation in the US.